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Institute hosts China visitors
By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor
Partnerships focused on technologies ranging from photovoltaic cells to nanomedicine, now under development in UB's Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, were the subject of discussions between institute scientists and several Chinese companies whose representatives were part of a delegation that visited UB last week.
An agreement signed then also established joint ventures between two spinoff companies of the institute—Laser Photonics Technologies and Advanced Cytometric Instrumentation Systems—and two Chinese firms.
The relationship between officials and entrepreneurs in Fuyang City, one of China's fast-growing telecommunication centers, originated last fall when Paras N. Prasad, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the UB Department of Chemistry and executive director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics, traveled to Hongzhou, China, to receive a very prestigious honorary professorship from Zhejiang University (ZJU).
While at ZJU, one of China's top five research universities and the home of Chinese optics and photonics, Prasad visited nearby Fuyang and its optoelectronics industries at the invitation of its vice mayor. In June, he will return to Hongzhou to give the invited keynote speech at a joint meeting of the Optical Society of America and its Chinese optical society counterpart.
"The Fuyang telecommunications industry employs 10,000 people and is looking for opportunities to diversify," said Prasad.
Toward that end, nine entrepreneurs, scientists and government officials from Fuyang visited UB on April 2 to explore cooperation in the research and development of technologies that might be mutually beneficial.
After Huaquin Shen, the city's vice mayor, described through an interpreter Fuyang and its industrial outlook, Prasad presented an overview of the UB institute's research and development, including its $26 million in federal, state and industrial support.
The institute's five spin-off companies, including three located in the UB Technology Incubator: Laser Photonics Technologies, Advanced Cytometric Instrumentation Systems and Hybrid Technologies; NanoBiotix (France) and Solexant (Sunnyvale, Calif.) also were described.
Prasad stressed the institute's willingness to work with the Chinese scientists and officials on technologies of interest. He pointed out that institute scientists take a broadly interdisciplinary approach, leveraging physics, chemistry and engineering advances to push new developments further than academic laboratories at other institutions, which may only go as far as developing proof of concepts and prototypes.
"Many universities stop here," he said, "but we also do scale-up to make sure technologies are commercially viable and then technology transfer."
Institute scientists presented some of their latest findings in fields ranging from optoelectronics technologies and surface plasmon sensor technologies, to nanomagnetics, nanobiotechnology and up-conversion tag technologies.
Such technologies are geared toward applications including more powerful optical diagnostic probes, rollable light-weight photovoltaics, two-photon data storage and three-dimensional barcodes, which allow for the development of tamper-proof labels.
In particular, the Chinese scientists were impressed with the institute's development of, and licensing to Solexant Corp., a thin-film coating-based technology to harvest light in the currently unutilized infrared region, with high efficiency, but at about one-third the cost of currently available solar panels. The delegation visited Solexant's headquarters late last week to follow up on its interest in these technologies.
The delegation also toured the institute's laboratories, and watched presentations by principals at the spin-off companies located in the UB Technology Incubator and UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.
Faculty who made scientific presentations included Alexander Cartwright, , professor of electrical engineering and director of lasers and photonics at the institute; Roy Law, institute researcher; Edward Furlani, institute research professor; Andrey Kuzmin, institute senior scientist, and Indrajit Roy, institute research assistant professor.
At the UB Technology Incubator, presentations were made by Martin Casstevens, business manager at Advanced Cytometry Instrumentation Systems; Ryszard Burzynski, director of technologies at Hybrid Technologies, and Aliaksandr Kachynski, director of technologies at Laser Photonics Technologies. Marnie LaVigne, director of business development for the Center of Excellence and the UB Center of Advanced Technology (CAT), and Alan Rae, vice president of marketing and business development at Nanodynamics, Inc., a Western New York technology firm, also gave presentations.